Welcome to the Twilight Zone… where you pay for the advertising you view.

I found out something new when I phoned my ISP to complain about an $11 charge added to my bill for broadband use. I don’t download music. I avoid huge video files like YouTube. I do upload photos to Flickr and my blogs. I do window shop for open source and freeware programs. Until the last three months I was not paying extra for the broadband I used. That changed.

I am not uploading more photos than before. I’m not downloading more programs. What has changed are the flood of videos in blogs and most of all, the flood of ads using heavier files which take a long time to load even with my new PC and DSL connection. I am paying to see these files. I don’t want to see them and I very much don’t want to pay for them.

Why is it that each time we make the Internet faster we also make it slower? I wouldn’t say my connection running on DSL is really a lot faster than my old dial up connection ten years ago. In theory it should be much faster, light speed in comparison. It doesn’t seem to be that way. First, it was those HTML emails that slowed it down. Then the pop up ads which had to stop everything while they forced a new window open. Flash ads which often opened a new window and crashed your PC cause they couldn’t suck up bandwidth fast enough. Now, sites are running video ads which make you wait for them to load whether you like it or not. They slow your computer right down so you can’t even get it to move to another site or another page until the video has loaded.

Next month my broadband overflow is higher than $11, I asked when I changed my account. If I pay an extra $5 a month I have more broadband for the ads that want to suck it up. I’m still being screwed over. But, maybe it will cost me just a bit less each month. Thanks, yeah… thanks a lot!